


you will overstate your premise

by destronomics



Category: Iron Man (2008)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-11-25
Updated: 2009-11-25
Packaged: 2017-10-03 17:10:19
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,394
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20400
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/destronomics/pseuds/destronomics
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>8 personal fanon/canon bits about Pepper Potts.</p>
            </blockquote>





	you will overstate your premise

1) She is 19 when she gets the call. She is in Paris, the last of her money spent on rail ticket to Spain where a boy had told her he had a place for her to crash. Her mother is dying, and there's nothing Virginia could have done, and she didn't want her to worry, but could she come home? When Virginia comes home her mother is thin and smiling. "I can finally fit into those dresses you bring home," she says, like it's a joke and Virginia should laugh.

The thing is, the thing is, Virginia might have had the money, a few months back, for the treatments; she thinks she did at least. But her mother never told her and she never asked about the strange rasp in her voice over the line.

She's not sure who she hates more, then, when her mother finally dies.

2) There are jobs that don't appear on her resume, like "model" and "valet," and "model valet". Tony may have developed the building blocks for the algorithm that eventually became Google, but his attention span is short, and he doesn't ever make it past the fifth page when he _does_ bother to search for "Pepper Potts."

It's in moments like these that she's more than a little grateful that Tony seems to genuinely forget her real name isn't _actually_ "Pepper;" that it's a name _he_ gave her and not the one she was born with, and more importantly, _posed_ with. More than a little.

3) The year before she was discovered, Virginia took a class on art theory. Out of everything in the GE track, it looked like the easiest. She wasn't wrong, but not for the reason she had previously thought: it was easy because it was something she seemed to inherently understand, the arrangement of shapes and colors and shading to make an object or a surface pleasing to the eye. Studying felt less like work and more like remembering a story she used to hear when she was a child. She found herself nodding unconsciously, each time she came across a particularly well worded phrase that encapsulated what she had felt like she had always known.

Contrary to popular belief, there's not much room in modeling to work for artistic license. When she offers a suggestion to the the photographer about the light (she knows at this angle that the sun will make the detail on the bustier too muddy on film, and they will ask for re-shoots), he gives her this look like he's not really sure what to do with her.

She juts out a hip, tries to tilt her chin down so the light no longer casts a glare and shuts up. It's a skill she picks up then, changing herself to fit the mistakes others refuse to recognize, and later, getting far more skilled at it then she should.

4) What Christine says actually bothers her, because Pepper had made a distinct effort, four years in, to be more than just Tony's gopher. Under her reign, Stark Industries has donated more money to charities, foundations and scholarships than Microsoft did in a decade. She's on a first name basis with Melinda Gates ("Call me Mel, wouldn't want to waste your time.") and got Colin down in the lab to install a subroutine in Jarvis that only lets girls older than 18 in the house after 12 am. She's made a distinct effort, so it shouldn't be so easy to get Pepper to stare a little too long at the resume template in Microsoft Word and consider. Consider.

When she curses, she calls Bill Gates by his first name too.

5) She doesn't remember her father; she doesn't think she wants to, the way any small mention of him makes her mother get this look in her eye, unfocused, like she's somewhere else and wishing to be even further away. Virginia knows, implicitly, not to ask about him, how they met, if they married, the circumstances of him leaving. She doesn't ask and her mother never brings it up and it works, this stalemate of theirs, until her mother is sick and money is tight and a part of Virginia wants to be the reason for her mother's hurt, for the frown, wants to be the reason why her mother looks so damn tired all the damn time. If it is her fault, then it must mean it is within her power to fix.

This is another skill Virginia picks up and Pepper perfects. It never works.

6) At first she thinks Mr. Stark has something on Jim Rhodes, because she can't, for the life of her, figure out why he always answers when she calls. Whatever message Mr. Stark tells her to pass along, whether it's the usual ("Mr. Stark will be running 15 minutes late.") or the inexplicable ("Ivan"), it never seems to be the one Mr. Rhodes wants to hear.

Later, when Mr. Stark is just Tony, and Pepper vacillates between calling Mr. Rhodes "Rhodey" or "Jim" (depending on her state of inebriation, almost always courtesy of the Stark Industries company card), she sort of gets it, gets why he keeps picking up the phone even when knowing the news isn't going to be good.

Because even in the living room of Rhodey's ridiculously tiny condo, deeper in the valley than the best friend of the world's premier industrialist and multi-billionaire playboy had any right to be, Tony doesn't think twice about raiding Rhodey's fridge for the last of said best friend's beer and explaining to him why the latest modifications to the guiding systems of the 109s was both stupid and shortsighted, "...because increasing the range isn't going to change the fact they can't land worth shit, and you're just putting whoever you got in the wings to clean up the mess in greater fucking risk with this-- Who designed it for you? Was it Nathan? Over at Raytheon? Nathan's a _dick_, Rhodey, can't design worth _shit_ sober and he's Mormon, so..."

And Tony, legs splayed out under Rhodey's coffee table, sleeves rolled up and cufflinks in Pepper's clutch, Tony redesigns the fucking thing right then and there on the back of the Sunday edition of the _New York Times_ he stole from Rhodey's neighbor on the way in.

Pepper is on the couch, head on the armrest, feet tucked beneath the blanket Rhodey grabbed from the hall closet for her because LA decided to be cold for a change. He's on the other end, elbows on his knees, eyes bright despite Pepper knowing he matched Tony drink for drink that night, watching Tony solve what 12 million dollars in government funding hadn't even begun to touch. Tony is smiling and Rhodey looks a little in awe and she thinks maybe she gets it.

She gets it, gets _why_, and it doesn't sit as well with her as she'd like because Pepper knows better.

Pepper knows better: Rhodey answers because Tony always makes it worth his while, and Pepper calls because Tony pays her ridiculously good money and Los Angeles is expensive and. And. And.

Tony doesn't seem to notice a thing.

7) Tony doesn't actually ever hit on her. He waggles his eyebrows, sure, but he does that to Happy and Rhodey and Obie too. Pepper tries not to read too much into him asking her what she'd like to drink, or what she's doing on the weekend. By the second year, she mostly succeeds.

It's when he wipes his hands on his trousers before passing her the Pad Thai from the take-out bag, careful not to get any of the day's grease on her chopsticks, she falters, just a little.

8) Much later, after she's helped Tony to bed with hands placed as gently as possible on the spots of his skin that have yet to turn blue, and patched him haphazardly with bandages that she really should be better at applying by now, Pepper makes her way outside on the deck with a drink in hand. She tries to ignore the crick in her neck, the long ache ghosting across her shoulders; she leans down to touch the skin at her ankles, under the straps of her shoes, thinks about taking them off, and tries, really tries, not to miss Obadiah Stane.


End file.
